A Japanese billionaire is the mystery art collector behind the record $57.3 million purchase of a huge self-portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat at auction last week, his art foundation said.
“Jean-Michel Basquiat is coming to Japan,” businessman Yusaku Maezaw wrote on his Instagram account, posing in front of the painting.
Maezawa, who made his fortune in the clothing trade, bought seven works of art in two days for a total of $97.8 million.
Maezawa on Tuesday purchased Basquiat’s massive two-and-a-half by five meter untitled self-portrait from 1982, painted in Italy. The young Haitian-American artist, who pictured himself in the work with a demonic image among eye-popping colours, died in 1988 of a drug overdose at age 27.
In addition to the Basquiat, Maezawa acquired four other pieces of contemporary art at Christie’s late on Tuesday, according to a statement by his Tokyo-based Contemporary Art Foundation. They were sold for a total of $81.3 million.
On Wednesday, he purchased a work by Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie for $2.59 million, more than 10 times its low-end estimate, and another by American Christopher Wool for $13.91 million, at Sotheby’s, the auction house said.
His foundation said Maezawa is planning to open a private museum in several years in Chiba, Japan where he grew up, and has been collecting works of art for the last 10 years to fill it.
Records all around
New York’s spring art auction season saw total sales in excess of $1 billion — in line with expectations.
Other record-setting sales for artists included a sculpture of Adolf Hitler on his knees, titled “Him” by 55-year-old Italian Maurizio Cattelan, which fetched $17.2 million.
A 1939 painting by Frida Kahlo depicting two nude women sold on Thursday for $8 million, the highest price yet for any work by the iconic Mexican artist.
“There’s still a great deal of wealth in the world and ... no lack of buyers. It’s just that you have to be fair with your buyers, you have to be correct with your pricing and you have to have good works,” said Christopher D’Amelio, a partner at the David Zwirner gallery, which has two art spaces in New York and one in London.
Asian buyers, who everyone feared would stay away, turned up.
“They have been active in the past few years but now they’re starting to understand other genres of art. Abstraction, minimalism, things that were not natural when we started showing there,” said D’Amelio.
“There’s a real growth and a willingness to understand and an appetite and I think I’ve seen the effects of it.”